Sometime in 1825 or 1826, in a brick row house in Fells Point, Baltimore, a seven-year-old enslaved child was left alone for an hour. He climbed up to a shelf, pulled down the family’s school copy books, picked up a pen, and started copying letters into the blank spaces between the lines that another child had already written.
If he was caught, he would be flogged. The boy whose copy books he was tracing was the family’s son, “Master Tommy” Auld. The handwriting Frederick Douglass eventually built for himself was, quite literally, traced over the handwriting of the family that owned him.
I have written before about Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, Einstein’s notebooks, Thomas Edison’s productivity journals, Benjamin Franklin’s daily journal, Bruce Lee’s daily journals, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s journaling practice. Douglass belongs in that line, and reading about how he came to writing has changed how I think about all of them.
Most of what is online about Frederick Douglass treats him as an orator or as the author of three autobiographies. What is harder to find is the paper trail he left underneath all of that: copy books, account books, appointment ledgers, scrapbooks organized by subject, autograph albums full of friends’ signatures, and two diaries. The Library of Congress holds the Frederick Douglass Papers, and the archive is enormous. This post is about seven things those notebooks teach me about discipline, identity, and using paper to become someone.
A note on how to read this
Douglass at his desk in the library at Cedar Hill, his home in Washington, D.C., surrounded by the books and papers of a fifty-year writing life. Source: Library of Congress.
Douglass survived the violence of American slavery. He survived separation from his mother, the legal prohibition on Black literacy, and the very real risk of being beaten for opening a book. I am not interested in flattening any of that into a productivity lesson. The lessons that follow are about his practice – what he did with paper – not a polite repackaging of his suffering.
What I want to honor here is the work. Douglass did extraordinary things with notebooks. The fact that he did them while having to steal literacy back from a system designed to prevent it is the historical context. It is not the moral of a wellness story. I will name the facts, link out to where they are kept, and let the man speak for himself wherever I can.
1. Literacy can be stolen back: the copy book method
The title page of The Columbian Orator, the elocution textbook Douglass bought with wages from the Baltimore docks and carried with him when he escaped north in 1838. Source: The Columbian Orator (Boston, 1817).
The copy book story is the one Douglass tells in My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). Sophia Auld, his enslaver’s wife, had begun teaching him his letters when Douglass was small. Her husband Hugh forbade it the moment he discovered the lessons – a Black child who could read, he said, would become unfit to be enslaved. So Douglass had to continue alone.
He did it with whatever paper was already in the room. When the household was empty, he took Master Tommy’s school books and wrote in the unused space between the printed lines.
When my mistress left me in charge of the house, I had a grand time; I got Master Tommy’s copy books and a pen and ink, and, in the ample spaces between the lines, I wrote other lines, as nearly like his as possible. The process was a tedious one, and I ran the risk of getting a flogging for marring the highly prized copy books of the oldest son.
- Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)
I keep returning to that detail: “in the ample spaces between the lines.” The first move was not to find a new notebook. The first move was to write next to what was already written.
Later, while working the docks at Fells Point, Douglass befriended some of the white boys he worked alongside and got them to keep teaching him. When he had earned enough money on the wharf, he bought a copy of The Columbian Orator, Caleb Bingham’s 1797 textbook of elocution and abolitionist speeches. He carried that book with him when he escaped north in 1838. Some books become tools you keep using for the rest of your life.
If you have ever told yourself you cannot start a journal because you do not have the right notebook, Douglass has an answer: write in the margins of something else. Start with the paper already in the room.
2. A first sentence: “From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom”
The frontispiece and title page of the 1846 edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself – the book that contains the line quoted below. Source: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Boston, 1846).
The line is from the first of the three autobiographies. Once Douglass could recognize the letters of the alphabet, he writes, he understood something that no one had explained to him.
From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.
- Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845)
I sat with that sentence for a long time. He did not need a teacher to tell him what literacy would do. The act of reading was the act of understanding. The page was the doorway.
I think about that whenever I open a journal during a season of change. A journal is, in part, the place where you teach yourself what you already half-know. The writing is not the discovery. The writing is the moment the discovery becomes legible to you. Douglass had the most extreme version of this experience anyone has ever had, but the mechanism is the same one ordinary people use every morning at a desk.
3. Three autobiographies, each one longer than the last
The title page of the 1882 Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, the third and longest of his three autobiographies, written from the other side of emancipation. Source: Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Hartford, 1882).
Douglass wrote his life three times. The Narrative (1845) is short, controlled, and aimed at convincing white Northern readers that an enslaved man could indeed be the author of a book. My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) is twice as long and more interior. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, first published in 1881 and revised in 1892, is the long, full account written from the other side of emancipation and a public career.
The drafts of the Life and Times are at the Library of Congress, and they contain details that did not appear in the earlier books. One passage I keep thinking about describes his wife Anna Murray, a free Black woman who, by family tradition, sold her feather bed to help finance his escape. The 1881 manuscript has Douglass writing his first letter from freedom to her, telling her he had landed safely in New York.
I used to think rewriting a memoir was a kind of correction – the older version replacing the younger one. Reading Douglass in three layers, I see it differently. The second draft of a life is not a contradiction of the first. It is a record of what the writer now knows.
For ordinary journaling, the implication is small but real. Old journals are not finished. They are open files. Going back to a notebook from five years ago and adding what you understand now is part of the practice, not a betrayal of it.
4. Order as a form of power: the account books
A page from one of Douglass’s account books, recording receipts and expenditures for May 1881 down to the dollar and cent. Source: Library of Congress Frederick Douglass Papers.
The piece of Douglass I find easiest to forget is the household manager. He had a large family, a working estate at Cedar Hill in Washington, D.C., and a lecture income he had to track himself. He kept account books and appointment ledgers, and the Library of Congress holds them.
Order, the first law of heaven, is itself a power. The battle is nearly lost when your lines are in disorder.
- Frederick Douglass, “Self-Made Men” speech
One of the appointment pages from the 1860s shows him crossing the northeastern United States lecture by lecture, with a particularly punishing December. He knew what December looked like. He had written it down.
I find this section of his archive strangely steadying. We tend to picture Douglass as voice and pulpit. The reality is that the voice and the pulpit were supported by ledgers – by a man who tracked his money, his miles, and his calendar in cheap bound books. If you keep a budget notebook, a calendar with notes in the margins, or a running ledger of your work, you are in this lineage. Accounting is a form of journaling. Rockefeller kept the same kind of book at sixteen, and prized it above anything money could buy. The household and the lectern share the same paper habit.
5. WORK! WORK!! WORK!!! WORK!!!! – and the autograph album
“Self-Made Men” was the speech Douglass delivered more often than any other – dozens of times between 1859 and 1893. Midway through it, he collapses the whole argument into one word, repeated with mounting emphasis:
We may explain success mainly by one word and that word is WORK! WORK!! WORK!!! WORK!!!!
- Frederick Douglass, “Self-Made Men” speech
Read as a slogan it is almost a joke. Read as the takeaway of the actual speech, it is not. The speech is a long argument that nothing of value arrives without labor, and that the labor must be applied with order and over time. (You can read the full text of “Self-Made Men” at the Frederick Douglass Heritage Center and at various university archives.) The first half of the speech is the gospel of work. The second half is the part most internet quotations leave out.
Properly speaking, there are in the world no such men as self-made men. That term implies an individual independence of the past and present which can never exist.
- Frederick Douglass, “Self-Made Men”
A man who had every reason to claim sole authorship of his own rise refused the title. He insisted on the network around him.
You can see that network on paper in the autograph albums the Library of Congress holds. The first, gifted to him in Ireland in 1845, gathered signatures and inscribed poems from the hosts and allies he met on his abolitionist tour. A later album, kept during his 1880s travels, collected the handwriting of the reformers, writers, and friends he crossed paths with over decades. Page after page, the albums record the people who showed up around him – the same network he refused to write out of his own story.
The autograph album as a journaling form is almost gone now. The closest modern equivalent is a contact list with notes, or a CRM, or the messy text file where some people keep one line per friend. Whatever you call it, a list of the people you owe something to – and the people who keep showing up – is a journal of its own.
If you find these letters useful, I send a short email with one journaling lesson drawn from someone who actually kept the notebook. You can sign up here and the next one will come to you.
6. The scrapbook as a reading habit
One of Douglass’s Subject Files, labeled “Reminiscence of the Antislavery Conflict.” Source: Library of Congress Frederick Douglass Papers.
In Douglass’s library at Cedar Hill, at the time of his death, the Library of Congress catalogers found stacks of loose paper that they later filed under the heading Subject Files. The labels on the piles, in his own hand, included “Santo Domingo,” “Self-Made Men,” “Composite Nation,” “William the Silent,” “Reminiscence of the Antislavery Conflict,” and “John Brown.”
These were, in nineteenth-century terms, his commonplace books – except he had broken them apart into open piles by topic instead of binding them. He clipped newspapers obsessively, and he annotated what he clipped – marginal notes talking back to the article in front of him. He read with a pen.
Friends who watched him lecture remembered that he often went to the podium with only a sheet of paper scrawled with a dozen subject words, plus a small armful of clippings he intended to read aloud at the right moment. The subjects were his outline. The clippings were his evidence. He had read everything he needed to before he stood up to speak.
If you keep a folder of clippings in Notion, a “links to read” file in Obsidian, or a single notes app you dump articles into, you are running a Douglass-style subject file. The lesson is not that you need a perfect system. The lesson is that the habit of clipping under topics and talking back to the page is one of the most durable journaling forms in the language. Douglass built a public career on it.
7. The diary as a place to fix dates
The March 17, 1894 diary entry in which Douglass, using the size of the spring lambs to fix a date, worked out that he had been sent to live with Hugh Auld in Baltimore in 1825 – the entry quoted below. Source: Library of Congress Frederick Douglass Papers.
Douglass kept two diaries, both during international travel. The earlier one is a small pocket notebook he carried in 1871 when President Grant sent him to Santo Domingo (the Dominican Republic) as a U.S. commissioner. In it he recorded names of the people he met and noted that he had stood at the house of Christopher Columbus, on the spot where the first enslaved Africans were sold in the Americas. The later one is a thicker travel diary he kept in 1886 and 1887, on a longer trip through Europe and Africa with his second wife, Helen Pitts Douglass.
He closed the travel diary when he got home. He did not open it again for six years.
Then, on March 17, 1894, one year before his death, he reopened it and wrote one more entry. He had been to Baltimore the day before and had visited a grandson of the Auld family, a Dr. Thomas Edward Sears, who had told him a set of dates he had never been able to confirm. He wrote them down. Then he reasoned through to the one date he wanted most:
The death of Aaron Anthony makes me to fix the year in which I was sent to live with Mr. Hugh Auld in Baltimore as 1825. I know that it must have been in the summer of that year that I went to live in Baltimore because the Spring lambs were big enough to be sent to market and I helped to drive a flock of them from Smith’s Dock to Fells Point on the day I landed in Baltimore.
- Frederick Douglass, diary entry, March 17, 1894
He used the size of the lambs to date himself.
Douglass had been denied his birthdate, like every other enslaved child. He spent his whole life recovering details about his own life that had been withheld. The diary, sixty-nine years after the fact, was where he finally fixed the year he was sent to the Aulds.
A diary can be the place a person goes to recover what was taken from them. That is the simplest thing it is for. Modern readers do not have the same magnitude of loss, but most of us have lost more dates than we realize – which year did a friendship cool, which month did the bad season actually end. A diary that you keep returning to is the only practical answer I know.
8. The book he carried when he escaped
I want to end where I started, with one object.
When Douglass boarded a northbound train in Baltimore on September 3, 1838, dressed as a sailor with borrowed papers, the things he carried were few. The Columbian Orator, the textbook he had bought with dock wages as a teenager, was one of them.
There is a version of journaling that is just the act of carrying the right book with you. Douglass kept that one for the rest of his life. It is the kind of object that records a self that is still becoming. A journal, sometimes, is that kind of object too.
What I took from Douglass’s notebooks
Three things, mostly.
First, I will treat the blank space between the lines as space, not as nothing. If I do not have a fresh notebook, I have margins. If I do not have margins, I have the back of an envelope. The first move is to write something.
Second, I will keep a “Subject File” for the handful of topics I want to be able to speak about. Mine lives in a notes app, not in a stack on a library table, but the principle is the same: clip, annotate, talk back, and arrive at the conversation already read.
Third, I will be more careful about dates. Douglass spent a lifetime recovering what had been withheld from him about his own beginnings. I have no excuse not to write down the small ones – when something started, when something ended, when a year turned.
If pieces like this are useful to you, I send a short email with one journaling lesson drawn from someone who actually kept the notebook. You can sign up here. The free guide that comes with the welcome email is “6 Simple Steps to Getting Started with Journaling,” which is short on theory and meant to get a notebook open on a desk this week.
And if this is the first piece you have read in the series, the rest are here: the journals of successful people, with full posts on Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Bruce Lee, Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin, and Martin Luther King Jr. Douglass is the seventh in the series, and the one whose paper trail I most wish I had known about sooner.
If his two travel diaries are the part that stayed with you, how to keep a travel journal covers the format and what to record while a place is still unfamiliar.
For Douglass beside Du Bois, King, and Lorde, see notebooks of the civil rights movement.
Featured image: Frederick Douglass in an early photographic portrait. He sat for more photographs than any other American of the nineteenth century and used his own image deliberately against racist caricature. Source: Library of Congress.
